10 Reasons To Delete Your Facebook Account

After some reflection, I've decided to delete my account on
Facebook. I'd like to encourage you to
do the same. This is part altruism and part selfish. The
altruism part is that I think Facebook, as a company, is
unethical. The selfish part is that I'd like my own social
network to migrate away from Facebook so that I'm not missing
anything. In any event, here's my "Top Ten" reasons for why you
should join me and
many others and
delete your account.

10. Facebook's Terms Of
Service are completely one-sided. Let's start
with the basics. Facebook's Terms Of Service state that
not only do they own your data (section 2.1), but if you don't
keep it up to date and accurate (section 4.6), they can terminate
your account (section 14). You could argue that the terms are
just protecting Facebook's interests, and are not in practice
enforced, but in the context of their other activities, this
defense is pretty weak. As you'll see, there's no reason to give
them the benefit of the doubt. Essentially, they see their
customers as unpaid employees for crowd-sourcing ad-targeting
data.

9. Facebook's CEO has a
documented history of unethical behavior. From the very
beginning of Facebook's existence, there are questions about
Zuckerberg's ethics. According
to BusinessInsider.com, he used Facebook user data to guess
email passwords and read personal email in order to discredit his
rivals. These allegations, albeit unproven and somewhat dated,
nonetheless raise troubling questions about the ethics of the
CEO of the world's largest social
network. They're particularly compelling given that Facebook
chose to
fork over $65M to settle a related lawsuit alleging that
Zuckerberg had actually stolen the idea for Facebook.

8. Facebook has flat out declared war on
privacy. Founder and CEO of
Facebook,
in defense of Facebook's privacy changes last January:
"People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more
information and different kinds, but more openly and with more
people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over
time." More recently, in introducing the Open Graph
API: "... the default is now
social." Essentially, this means Facebook not only wants to know
everything about you, and own that data, but to make it available
to everybody. Which would not, by itself, necessarily be
unethical, except that ...

6. Facebook is a bully. When Pete Warden
demonstrated just how this bait-and-switch works (by crawling
all the data that Facebook's privacy settings changes had
inadvertently made public) they sued him. Keep in mind, this
happened just before they announced the Open Graph API and stated that the "default is now social." So
why sue an independent software developer and fledgling
entrepreneur for making data publicly available when you're
actually already planning to do that yourself? Their real agenda
is pretty clear: they don't want their membership to know how
much data is really available. It's one thing to talk to
developers about how great all this sharing is going to be; quite
another to actually see what that means in the form of files
anyone can download and load into MatLab.

5. Even your private data is shared with
applications. At this point, all your data is
shared with applications that you install. Which means now
you're not only trusting Facebook, but the application
developers, too, many of whom are too small to worry much about
keeping your data secure. And some of whom might be even more
ethically challenged than Facebook. In practice, what this means
is that all your data - all of it - must be effectively
considered public, unless you simply never use any Facebook
applications at all. Coupled with the OpenGraph API, you are no longer trusting Facebook, but
the
Facebook ecosystem.

3. Facebook makes it incredibly difficult to truly delete
your account. It's one thing to make data public or even
mislead users about doing so; but where I really draw the line is
that, once you decide you've had enough, it's
pretty tricky to really delete your account. They
make no promises about deleting your data and every application
you've used may keep it as well. On top of that, account deletion
is incredibly (and intentionally) confusing. When you go to your
account settings, you're given an option to deactivate
your account, which turns out not to be the same thing as
deleting it. Deactivating means you can still be tagged in photos
and be spammed by Facebook (you actually have to opt out of
getting emails as part of the deactivation, an incredibly easy
detail to overlook, since you think you're deleting your
account). Finally, the moment you log back in, you're back like
nothing ever happened! In fact, it's really not much different
from not logging in for awhile. To actually delete your
account, you have to find a link buried in the on-line help (by
"buried" I mean it takes five clicks to get there). Or you can
just click
here. Basically, Facebook is trying to trick their users into
allowing them to keep their data even after they've "deleted"
their account.

2. Facebook doesn't (really) support the Open
Web. The so-called Open Graph API is named so as to disguise its fundamentally
closed nature. It's bad enough that the idea here is that we all
pitch in and make it easier than ever to help Facebook collect
more data about you. It's bad enough that most consumers will
have no idea that this data is basically public. It's bad enough
that they claim to own this data and are aiming to be the one
source for accessing it. But then they are disingenuous enough to
call it "open," when, in fact, it is completely proprietary to
Facebook. You can't use this feature unless you're on Facebook. A
truly open implementation would work with whichever social
network we prefer, and it would look something like OpenLike. Similarly, they implement
just enough of OpenID to claim
they support it, while aggressively promoting a proprietary
alternative, Facebook
Connect.

1. The Facebook application itself sucks.
Between the farms and the mafia wars and the "top news" (which
always guesses wrong - is that configurable somehow?) and the
myriad privacy settings and the annoying ads (with all that data
about me, the best they can apparently do is promote dating
sites, because, uh, I'm single) and the thousands upon thousands
of crappy applications, Facebook is almost completely useless to
me at this point. Yes, I could probably customize it better, but
the navigation is ridiculous, so I don't bother. (And, yet,
somehow, I can't even change colors or apply themes or do
anything to make my page look personalized.) Let's not even get
into how slowly your feed page loads. Basically, at this point,
Facebook is
more annoying than anything else.

Facebook is clearly determined to add every feature of every
competing social network in an attempt to take over the Web (this
is a never-ending quest that goes back to AOL and those damn CDs that were practically
falling out of the sky). While Twitter isn't the most usable
thing in the world, at least they've tried to stay focused and
aren't trying to be everything to everyone.

I often hear people talking about Facebook as though they were
some sort of monopoly or public trust. Well, they aren't. They
owe us nothing. They can do whatever they want, within the bounds
of the laws. (And keep in mind, even those criteria are pretty
murky when it comes to social networking.) But that doesn't mean
we have to actually put up with them.
Furthermore, their long-term success is by no means guaranteed -
have we all forgotten MySpace? Oh, right, we have.
Regardless of the hype, the
fact remains that Sergei Brin or Bill Gates or Warren Buffett
could personally acquire a majority stake in Facebook without
even straining their bank account. And Facebook's revenue remains
more or less a rounding error for more established tech
companies.

While social networking is a fun new application category
enjoying remarkable growth, Facebook isn't the only game in town.
I don't like their application nor how they do business and so
I've made my choice to use other providers. And
so can you.